Independent component analysis for robust assessment of auditory system maturation in children with cochlear implants.

The long latency auditory evoked potential (LLAEP) has been used for tracking changes in latency and morphology of the P1 peak in order to evaluate the maturation of the auditory system in children with cochlear implants (CIs). Cochlear implants can induce an artefact in the recordings when sounds are presented, which makes the analysis of LLAEPs much harder. Independent component analysis (ICA) has been used to remove this artefact. In this paper we apply a procedure based on ICA to reduce the CI artefact, to detect the LLAEPs and to use the changes in the spatial projections of their independent components (ICs) for a robust evaluation of the maturation of the auditory system in children with CIs.